Heinlein Juveniles Postscript

This project has dominated my reading for 2025. I officially announced it back in November of 2024, as it was to be a project to take place between my thirty-ninth and fortieth birthdays. However, at that time I'd recently started reading Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb, and I underestimated just how long that would take me to finish (it was a bit of a slog). So I didn't get to kick things off properly until February.

From February through July, Heinlein was pretty much the only author I was reading. Starting in August, I finally opened a Christmas present from last year and got back into Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series. But I knew that wouldn't stop me from completing the Heinlein project ahead of schedule.

Here are my final rankings for all fourteen books. It divided them up into five tiers, because really I feel kind of ambivalent about some of the individual rankings, but the tiers are solid and I stand by them. I'll link to my blog post for each book. And before I do that, I'll link to the post that introduced this project, so the post you're reading now can serve as a kind of master post for the whole project, indexing everything.

Tier 1: Transcendant, All-Time Superlative Works

1. Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)

2. Starship Troopers (1959)

Tier 2: Great Books, Personal Favorites (and not just among YA novels)

3. The Star Beast (1954)

4. The Rolling Stones (1952)

5. Tunnel in the Sky (1955)

6. Space Cadet (1948)

7. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) 

Tier 3: Excellent Juvenile Science Fiction

8. Podkayne of Mars* (1963)

9. Starman Jones (1953)

10. Between Planets (1951)

Tier 4: Still Good, But Flawed

11. Red Planet (1949)

12. Time for the Stars (1956)

13. Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

Tier 5: Mediocre, Deserved Revision 

14. Farmer in the Sky (1950)

This has been a blast. I might try something like it again some day.

*Arguably not part of the Heinlein juveniles, but I include it anyway for the sake of completeness. 

Podkayne of Mars

Back in June and July of 2006, this was the very first Heinlein novel I ever read. And having re-read it recently, I bring my personal Heinlein juveniles project to a close. Well, there's a complication I threw into the mix well after the project started. I purchased a copy of Grumbles from the Grave and I'm currently reading that. I already know that some of the information in that book might shed some light on some of the juveniles. But that's nonfiction anyway. So yeah, this project is completed. I re-read all twelve thirteen fourteen Heinlein juveniles before my own fortieth birthday.

I talked about alternative versions of a juveniles "canon" in my previous post, and I won't belabor the point. I'm counting Podkayne of Mars as a juvenile because it has a young protagonist with a tone and themes that put it closer to Starship Troopers than to something like Methuselah's Children. I could see an argument that some of his other works, The Door into Summer comes in mind, would probably also feel similar except for the fact that the protagonist is an adult. But I wanted to include it for the sake of being as complete as possible and in order to give this series a book with a female POV protagonist.

Although the first few Heinlein juveniles were pretty much distinctly boys' stories about boys, the author did eventually include some great female characters in the novels. Here's my rundown...

Rocket Ship Galileo (1947): Totally a boy's story. One of the boys' mothers gets some good lines early on, but this whole book is a sausage fest.

Space Cadet (1948): Setting is seemingly a gender-specific military academy, so human female characters are very minor. If the female aliens count, though? These are still some of my favorite aliens in any book. 

Red Planet (1949): Little sister is a minor character. It shifts partway through from being a boy-focused story to being one about a whole community, but most of the leading characters there are men anyway. There is a single instance of a woman taking the reins with some of this stuff, but it's very brief.

Farmer in the Sky (1950): Stepsister is an invalid and used to illustrate the grueling nature of the frontier environment. Stepmom gets some lines early on and then kind of weirdly goes totally silent for almost the whole book.

Between Planets (1951): Isobel actually gets some significant presence here. I compared this book to Esther Forbes' Johnny Tremain. What starts out as a survival story for Don sort of morphs into a revolutionary war framing with a boy becoming a man against that backdrop. If this had run on for longer instead of ending in a hazy Deus Ex Machina with no real denouement, we could have really gotten a lot more Don/Isobel material to work with.

The Rolling Stones (1952): So Hazel Stone steals the show here and Edith is a decent minor character too. Meade ends up being kind of the family member with the least development in the pages. Missed opportunity? Maybe. It's framed as a Castor and Pollux story, so the twins get top billing and their grandma steals the show anyway. The whole dynamic between the boys and their father is key to tying the whole narrative together, and their mother's profession keeps coming up as a hook that somehow causes more trouble for the family than the twins' shenanigans. There's just not that much room in such a thin book for the Big Sister character to take the spotlight. I read that James Nicoll called this book's "sexual politics" tragic, and thought that was an especially inane analysis.

Starman Jones (1953): Eldreth counts as a major character here, but it seems like this whole thing could have been smoother with a female crew member taking on that role instead of a passenger. The whole idea is that Max ordinarily can't go where the passengers are. And I guess Heinlein wanted to make her a spoiled rich girl, so the passenger thing fit the bill. Maybe a missed opportunity, though?

The Star Beast (1954): Betty is great. If the whole series had female characters like this, then the Heinlein juveniles would probably be remembered very differently in the zeitgeist.

Tunnel in the Sky (1955): Pretty balanced. Multiple important female characters. And the treatment of gender roles struck me as pretty thoughtful.

Time for the Stars (1956): There are various minor female characters. Actually, I think this book could be a candidate for gender-swapping the original twins. Maybe I just didn't love this one as much.

Citizen of the Galaxy (1957): Multiple minor female characters, but the main character bounces from each of his main arcs to the next such that there is really only one major character because no one else is really following him to the next leg of his journey. Reasonably balanced, given the settings described.

Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958): Peewee and the Mother Thing are both major characters.

Starship Troopers (1959): Various female characters, but Heinlein commits to the bit of having the main character take up a role in what is basically heavy infantry, a role that was historically about 100% male. Even its closest analogs in the present day are still sausage fests.

Even if Heinlein later contextualized it in a different way (and I'm curious to see what he says about it once I get to that section of Grumbles from the Grave), it really feels like Podkayne of Mars was partially about him wanting to finally do one of these stories with a young girl front-and-center, to make it her story and not have her show up as the sidekick to a boy. He'd already done that in short stories, but never before in a novel.

I believe that Heinlein found his mark with Podkaynen's narrative voice. Initially, Podkayne struck me as being rather witty, but so over-the-top that it was a bit cringeworthy and almost chauvinist. But then I remembered that the character is about sixteen Earth years old, and I've met some sixteen-year-old girls myself. They really are over-the-top. And Podkayne's voice hitting the mark is vital to the story because it's mostly just a kind of travelogue with lots of foreshadowing for the dark conclusion. Most authors could not pull that off and wouldn't even try. Heinlein pulls it off. This was never going to be as great of a book as The Rolling Stones or Have Space Suit—Will Travel. But it really is pretty good.

Two matters surrounding the publication of Podkayne of Mars are especially noteworthy. The first isn't such a big deal, I think, but I'll address it anyway. For better or worse, Podkayne of Mars is more similar to the juveniles than to most of Heinlein's books for adults. And while Heinlein did write plenty of short stories for adults that were published in magazines during the early arc of the juveniles and even eventually wrote some adult novels for other publishers in between the publication of the Scribner's juveniles, I think those could be said to have taken a back seat to the juveniles. It looks like the only ones that were actually both written and published contemporaneously were The Puppet Masters (1951, after Between Planets and before The Rolling Stones), Double Star (1956, between Tunnel in the Sky and Time for the Stars), and The Door into Summer (1957, between Citizen of the Galaxy and Have Space Suit—Will Travel). But Podkayne of Mars came out in 1963, and the 1960's were when almost all of Heinlein's most famous and beloved books for adults were written. Just look at the sequence starting from the canonical end of the juveniles, with Have Space Suit—Will Travel marking the final volume published by Scribner's. It goes...

1959: Starship Troopers

1961: Stranger in a Strange Land

1963: Podkayne of Mars

1963: Glory Road

1964: Farnham's Freehold

1966: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress 

Of those, Farhnam's Freehold has generally been panned, but the others are probably Heinlein's most famous novels of all time. Actually, even Glory Road probably gets overshadowed by the other three. They're critical and commercial juggernauts, and having Podkayne of Mars right there in the middle of them makes it look especially weak by comparison.

But that's fine! There's no rule that says an author's greatest works should be distributed in some specific manner through the course of a career, nor one that states a less remarkable work standing amidst a cluster of masterpieces in a bibliography is made worse by the greatness of its neighbors.

And now we come to the elephant in the room: the ending. The final page of the final chapter of Podkayne of Mars were changed at the insistence of an editor at Putnam's. While this blog has never been a spoiler-free safe haven, I also don't really even want to get into the weeds with the differences between the two endings. Instead, I'll put it this way...

1. The originally written ending is now widely available. I'd say that it is and should be considered the canonical ending. Any analysis that judges the book as a whole based on the originally published ending would be disingenuous, unless it was written decades ago, when it was the default ending.
2. I appreciate that Baen published my version with both endings, for a neat side-by-side comparison.
3. I'll read Heinlein's letter about this in Grumbles from the Grave, but I think it's pretty obvious why he'd be annoyed about the specific nature of the revision that Putnam's demanded.
4. I can wrap my head around the objection that the editor had to the original ending. I can wrap my head around Heinlein's objection to the objection. But what I just don't get is how the editor, on seeing the revised version, ever thought, "Yeah, OK. This fixes what I complained about. This works. We shall publish this version." Heinlein didn't just phone in a tonally different ending. He managed to, in six paragraphs, craft an ending that presumably met the technical requirement of the editor, but which is somehow so much darker and basically just screams, "I don't belong!"
5. Plenty of authors experienced great frustration at editorial interference in their work. Heinlein hardly ever did, so the fact that he did with this novel is noteworthy. In some ways, the controversy over the ending surpasses the importance of the entire book in the story of Heinlein's career, and that's just kind of sad.
6. From what I've read so far in Grumbles from the Grave, maybe Heinlein avoided editorial interference most of the time because he was such a diva about it.

That's enough on this one. I decided I'll do one more post to wrap this project up. There may or may not be an epilogue post related to information I learned in Grumbles from the Grave.

Starship Troopers

I am now most of the way through my re-read of Podkayne of Mars, so I'd better hurry and write up a post for Starship Troopers. In my previous post, I wrote about how Have Space Suit—Will Travel sort of acts as a culmination or capstone on the thematic arc that started with Rocket Ship Galileo and then continued for eleven more novels. It's such a perfect ending to such an amazing series that extending my personal "canon" of the Heinlein juveniles feels wrong. And that was in the back of my mind for most of my re-reading of Starship Troopers.

I could probably make a case for three different versions of the juveniles "canon" as I envision it. One version stops with the end of the Scribner's run, with a series of twelve stories that expand their scope in time and space, bringing the reader on a wonderful journey that eventually comes back home in an intriguing, yet sobering way. Another version includes that entire arc, but doesn't stop there. It includes the final book submitted to Scribner's, which remains a juvenile, but expects a bit more maturity out of the reader, a start of what could have been "Juveniles 2.0" and introduced the kids who grew up with the first dozen novels to more advanced topics. And a third version, the one I'm processing now that I'm midway through Podkayne of Mars, has everything from the first two version, keeps the tone set by Starship Troopers, but ultimately shows how when Heinlein came back to the well for another juvenile protagonist, he was thwarted in one of the biggest upsets in his writing career and moved on to books for adults thereafter.

There is so much that I could say about Starship Troopers. It is Heinlein's second most famous book for good reasons. And I guess I'll start with my own Livejournal post from just over nineteen years ago.

I read this book almost a week ago, but I'm so lazy that I didn't make an entry until now. Anyway, I was definitely impressed. It's a good book. I don't know. I think I was expecting more. Not that something was really missing, but maybe I thought the book would be longer, even though that doesn't really make sense because I had the book in my hands and could see that it was easily less than 300 pages.

Even thought I knew better, I expected the book to be like the movie, and it was not even remotely similar. Basically none of the characters that are in the book are actually in the movie. They did keep some names, but the characters themselves are completely different. And the book has like, messages and stuff. The movie is just a cheesy caricature. It's as though Paul Verhoeven hated the book but wanted to make the movie anyway. For what it's worth, I kind of like the movie. The biggest problem is that it has the same name as the book and is purportedly based on it.

One thing the book does that's a bit contrived is give us really long flashbacks that are conveniently placed for Heinlein to deliver his philosophy (via the main character's schoolteacher). It's interesting stuff, but seems so removed from the events going on in the rest of the book. Really, I guess my criticism is that the book hops between being philosophical and being action-packed and it gets to be a bit awkward, but mostly, even that is actually done with class. It's an easy read and certainly kept me hooked. A lot. It feels like I've been rather critical here but this book definitely makes my top 50. Not sure exactly where I'd rank it, but it's going on the list.

I hunted this post down prior to beginning my re-read, but I kind of can't wrap my head around it. I can't quite remember the space my head was in back then. My take now? The book is great and I wasn't positive enough about it back then. I'd say that I'd fight the twenty-two year old version of myself over this crappy review, but I am out of shape and he would probably wear me down.

I am spontaneously electing to write the rest of this post, other than a brief conclusion, in bullet point form. Tacky? Too bad. I thought of the idea just now and it appeals to me.

• I cannot believe that I had anything positive to say about that movie. The years since my first reading of the book have really exhausted my patience with trite comparisons between the book and movie.
• A lot of the criticisms of the book, specifically winging about militarism, fascism, misogyny, conflating it with the aforementioned bad movie, or siding with the aliens instead of the humans because some folks are telling on themselves about their own misanthropy, was fully addressed in this essay I'll link to here: http://kentaurus.com/troopers.htm
• Johnnie's descriptions of women throughout the book and discussions of male-female relationships stand out to me more now, especially given the more explicitly sex-driven stuff in Heinlein's later work. There's a certain charm. When the topic comes up and I see any discussion of Heinlein writing about anything to do with women or sex, it's always post-Stranger infamous Dirty Old man Heinlein. But Starship Troopers? He hadn't given up on reining it in, I guess. Maybe it really is a YA novel. It is restrained. That's true. And in a certain sense it is artificial. It's a military story. The main character is infantry. Realistically, there'd be raunchier dialogue and stuff. It's also written with Johnnie as a narrator selecting details, so maybe he did see and hear stuff and even participate, but considers it crass to put in this account and is leaving it out the same way he left out things like the identities of which men were saved when the lieutenant sacrificed his life to throw two men into the evacuation bay. So on the one hand, it's dialed back a little too obvious and on the other hand there's plausible reason for that. But what struck me more than that was what Johnnie does say about women: it's so uncannily reverent. Almost worshipful. It really resonates in a way I guess I didn't pick up on in 2008, and I don't know why not.
• I know at some point I was told that the high school flashbacks to Mr. Dubois are intrusive or hamfisted, and I recall just kind of accepting that on my first reading. I was actually a bit worried that I'd enjoy this one less than the other juveniles because I was expecting long sermons to be in there. But that criticism now seems overstated. The book strikes a good balance and does a good job of grounding the progress of the main plot while still jumping around the timeline to add context. It's smooth. Even in that old LJ post, I described the political asides as "long flashbacks." And on re-reading the book, I'm taken aback. I had totally remembered a version of this book in which the political conversations pad the book out with numerous extended flashback scenes. Did I get brainwashed by online descriptions of the book, even despite having read it myself? Those scenes are sparse, are deeply connected to the scenes preceding them, and are each like two pages of dialogue.
• Considering how much fodder Heinlein gave readers for controversy in his later books, trying to mire this one is just tacky. Some of that just comes from a weird "Everything is fascist" crowd that decided Heinlein was fascist. And they're idiots. They're stupid, moronic people. I ain't got time for that nonsense. But that's only some of it. I think that much of the rest is more telling because it generally hinges on the nuances of the political system used in the world of Starship Troopers. Folks either misunderstand it as being a literal polemic by Heinlein, a blueprint for what he wanted society to look like, or they get pedantic about chasing after perceived flaws or inconsistencies. They want to challenge the realism of a political system used as a backdrop in a novel about a career soldier on the battlefield. At that point, it's like Heinlein already won. You already bought in. If you have burning questions about how big the labor battalions are or how dangerous they are or how free the press is, then don't kid yourself. That's not lit-crit. That's fangirling.
• If we divided up YA into two markets, it's kind of like the earlier books were more like "Early YA" and Starship Troopers is "Late YA." Booksellers don't operate that way, but maybe Heinlein wanted to. I don't know. I think that this could apply to Podkayne of Mars as well.
• I wonder about an alternate timeline in which Scribner's ran with Starship Troopers and Heinlein kept writing more books in that vein. That either means no Stranger in a Strange Land or that it gets pushed back until later in his career. Considering the cultural significance of that book and the timing of it, that's a huge change. He became the biggest name in science fiction and Stranger in a Strange Land was no small part of that. But then, what would we get instead?

In conclusion, this is one of my favorite books and one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time. Among the Heinlein juveniles, I'd rate it as being second, right behind Have Space Suit—Will Travel.

Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Wow. What a book. This was my final book in the series to not be a re-read. It's the best one so far and feel like a proper culmination to twelve years of these novels. Maybe this is giving Heinlein too much retrospective credit. But I could almost see him thinking, "I can already tell that the stiffnecks at Scribner's aren't going to let me keep doing these the way I want to do them. My next book is going to push the maturity of themes here and if they go for it, then great. We'll be doing books for a bit of an older audience than before. But if they don't, then this can be capstone for the kids who followed this journey through the previous eleven books."

We started with Rocket Ship Galileo, which grounds itself in a near-future scenario. From there, we start out with books taking place primarily around our own solar system, moving outward from Venus to Mars to Ganymede, and beyond. The scale and scope of settings continues to grow, eventually moving up to a galactic scale. Then we bounce back to a kind of near-future scenario with Have Space Suit—Will Travel, but it recapitulates the theme of travel to the moon, then out into the solar system, then to a distant star, and finally moves beyond our galaxy before bringing us back home. It feels like the perfect conclusion to a journey.

Perhaps Heinlein had no idea that this would be the last Scribner's juvenile. I don't know. But even if he didn't, I think that the idea was for this book to close the arc he'd started with the first book, and for his next "juvenile" to become the beginning of something new.

Anyway, this one is pretty damn close to perfection. I love it. Ten out of ten, etcetera.

That's my take. What about Critical Reception?

Floyd C. Gale wrote that the book "is possibly the most unabashedly juvenile of Heinlein's long list ... Great for kids, chancy for grownups who don't identify readily with adolescent heroes".

Who hurt you, Floyd C. Gale? Who hurt you?

Final ranking for the twelve "Scribner's" juveniles, bearing in mind that even the worst of them is still better than most science fiction out there:

1. Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)
2. The Star Beast (1954)
3. The Rolling Stones (1952)
4. Tunnel in the Sky (1955)
5. Space Cadet (1948)
6. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)
7. Starman Jones (1953)
8. Between Planets (1951)
9. Red Planet (1949)
10. Time for the Stars (1956)
11. Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
12. Farmer in the Sky (1950)

 Up next is Starship Troopers. 

Citizen of the Galaxy

This was the third and final book contained in the Infinite Possibilities omnibus. I guess the publishers chose that title for the novels from 1955 to 1957 because they expanded the scope of human civilization beyond the solar system and did this considerably more than the eight previous juveniles. I believe I grasp the theme. But wow, this one was a departure from the others. Most of the juveniles start on Earth. One never even leaves! And although some stories involve travel beyond our own solar system through super-futuristic technology like space-folding, there's a general theme of protagonists assuming some role in civilization as it expands, explores, and moves outward from Earth. The previous book, Time for the Stars, did this in a very literal sense, with a protagonist living aboard a ship traveling at relativistic speed away from home. Then this book starts and dumps the protagonist in a city on some planet we know nothing about, being sold as a four-year-old child slave on an auction block. Time for the Stars made the universe feel bigger through use of relativity and scale. Citizen of the Galaxy does it by presenting a kind of mature star-spanning civilization. It feels almost like a prototype for stories that other authors would later tell in the 60's, 70's, and beyond.

I didn't know what to make of Citizen of the Galaxy during most of my time reading it. The previous juveniles had things in common that this one steered away from. His young protagonists were usually relatable American kids. Even the one who was born on Mars seemed like an American country boy. Then he goes and pulls a bait-and-switch on us. The protagonist is a professional beggar living in a city named "Jubbulpore" on a planet that has no relationship with Earth. Freed from slavery but hunted by a tyrannical government that has targeted him for spying (he was an unwitting spy), Thorby escapes the planet and joins a clan of, well, they could be space gypsies (in the book they're the "Free Traders" but the real-world analog definitely seems to be Romani caravans).

The transitions in Thorby's life effectively divide the book into four phases. Heinlein does a masterful job of balancing them, so each one resonates and it feels like there's a meaningful sense of progression.

I do not know that anyone else has pointed it out, but I suspect that the anthropologist Thorby meets on the Sisu, Dr. Margaret Mader, is named as a little homage to Margaret Mead.

I wasn't enthralled by this one, but I did come to appreciate it by the end. Let's see some Critical Reception.

Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale praised the novel, saying "Heinlein is invariably logical. And invariably entertaining."

I'll endorse that blurb.

In The New York Times, Villiers Gerson received the novel favorably, declaring it "better than 99 per cent of the science-fiction adventures produced every year" despite structural problems and a weak ending."

A weak ending, huh? Well, the end is kind of terse. And its impact is really only felt if one really buys into the themes of freedom, duty, and justice that run throughout the story. It's a kind of intricate tapestry, and for that I'll give this one the nod over Starman Jones, but still rank it below my beloved Space Cadet. 

Time for the Stars

With the possible exception of the very first of these juveniles (Rocket Ship Galileo), the two from 1956 and 1957 were the novels I was least familiar with. Other than looking up the titles on the internet prior to purchasing copies to begin this project, I believe that I was unacquainted with either of these. It was not obvious to me from the title that the "time" aspect of Time for the Stars would mean Heinlein would be playing around with the passage of time, something I'd seen him do in books like The Door into Summer and Time Enough for Love. Fortunately, Heinlein is a master at playing around with time in storytelling, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that done in one of these books.

This books is only a time travel story in the relativistic sense. There's no "time machine" involved. It's Paul Langevin's twin paradox told as a science fiction story. The story is so much of a nod to "Rip Van Winkle" that Heinlein even mentions newspaper headlines referring to the surviving crewmembers returning from the voyage as "another load of Rip Van Winkles."

A notorious feature of Heinlein's work I haven't really touched on in these reviews, and which I was actually kind of expecting not to, is his proclivity to normalize sexual arrangements in his fiction that would be highly unusual or scandalous in the real world. I'd seen a slight hint of this in The Star Beast when Betty was the one who proposed marriage to John, but I guess I'm still not too sure how strange a female-initiated marriage proposal was or wasn't in 1954. I think that it was abnormal but socially acceptable? Not sure. Well, this book has the main character marry his twin brother's great-great-granddaughter. While that's tame compared to some of Heinlein's later fiction, I'd think that it would have maybe been shocking to audiences in 1956, but perhaps that assumption is wrong. Obviously Scribner's kept publishing Heinlein juveniles after this one, so apparently they weren't offended.

The writing here is solid and the character development is as interesting as it is in any of the other books in the series. The ships and planets were cool and the descriptions of the struggles with instant-speed telepathy while confronting time dilation wonderfully imaginative. But my favorite part of this whole book was seeing Tom and the other "Rip Van Winkles" return to Earth and deal with the culture shock of having been out in space for the past four years and returning home with seventy-one years having passed in their absence. I've seen other science fiction stories do the whole "Rip Van Winkle" thing before, but they usually have the guy who goes to the future be some contemporary dude, as Asimov did with Pebble in the Sky. It was refreshing to see this device used not as a trope, but with what really starts as a character in a science fiction story and keeps being one all the way through.

I say that my favorite part is the part after Tom's ship returns to Earth. Well, there's the rub: that part of the book is deplorably brief. Heinlein spent so much time with psychological drama and Tom's trials and tribulations as a crewmember aboard the ship that by the time we get to the really interesting part, we're almost out of book. I described Heinlein as a master of playing around with time in storytelling, and I stand by that. In this case, ironically enough, he manages the time devoted to each plot point rather poorly. The stuff about Tom communicating with Pat while Pat is undergoing surgery for his injury just isn't that interesting. There are parts of Time for the Stars that I really like, but overall, I found this to be one of the weakest books in the series overall.

There's not much in the way of Wikipedia "Critical Reception" on this one.

Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale praised the novel as "an engrossing yarn", saying "The plot twists will take you by surprise and the characterizations delight you.

That's true enough. I hope I don't imply that I disliked this one. I do like it, just not quite as much as most of the other juveniles. In comparing all of them, one of them does have to be in last place after all. For me, that's still Farmer in the Sky. But next-to-last is a contest between this one and Rocket Ship Galileo.

I've already started Citizen of the Galaxy and I'm mildly surprised at the difference in tone. For no reason other than that these two stories were bundled together in the same volume, I mentally associated them with each other. Looks like that will probably seem a bit silly, but that's a topic for my next post.

Tunnel in the Sky

Here we are. Chronologically this is the eighth of Heinlein's juveniles and the third and final entry in this run of three re-reads for me, as well as the re-reading of a book for which the original reading was freshest out of any of these (I read this one in 2021). The next three posts here should all be about books I've never read before. So that's exciting. Before returning to this book, I'd noted that while Starman Jones and The Star Beast both exceeded my expectations based on prior memories of them, I didn't think that this one would be quite as good. More specifically, I said, "From my recollection, I do not think I'll rate it quite as highly, but it's also not going to be dead last. Probably somewhere in the middle, but we'll see."

That's kind of a low bar, and I think I know why. The end of this one is frustrating, and in notes that are very deliberate. Rod Walker refers to an Earth-based corporation pulling the rug out from under him, and it really feels like Heinlein pulls the rug out from under the reader too, so that we get a vivid sense of his anxiety. It's a bold technique, and I respect it, but it also really accentuates the bitterness in the bittersweet conclusion.

Reading this book directly after The Star Beast (something I had not done before) really drives home a certain theme that Heinlein delves into. Our culture, American culture and presumably its spiritual successors if we're optimistic about American hegemony in space colonization, and perhaps just Western culture in general has a tendency to treat adolescents as second-class citizens. We take children and, as they transition out of childhood, we run them through a gauntlet. We put them through trials and tribulations and impress upon them all the improvements they'll need to make in this new, adult world. But the moment it's convenient, we tell them that they're just kids and don't have rights anyway and need to listen when grownups are talking. And we justify it with all sorts of rationalizations, but it's bad. Like, this is really, really bad. I'm hoping something in the culture shifts to at least mitigate this issue, and I think Heinlein was hoping for that and using these stories to sort of lampoon the absurdity.

Ultimately, the ecology of "Tangaroa" in this book isn't as interesting as some of the other ecosystems that Heinlein devised. To some extent, the landscape is here in service of the narrative, and this is a landscape where a bunch of young people are stranded for two years, so the conditions have to be pretty mild.

I'd rate this as being one of the better stories so far. Glad I'm making that assessment after a re-read. I was recalling the gloomy bits and thought that I'd rate this one lower, but I ended up loving it right up to the moment of the rug-pull and feeling the full impact once the rug-pull happened. Of course it's still behind The Star Beast and The Rolling Stones. Knew it wouldn't dethrone either of those. Is it better than Starman Jones or Space Cadet? Hm, that's close. I'm calling it too close to call, but if pressed I'm pleading recency bias and giving the nod to Tunnel in the Sky.

I don't see "Critical Reception" for this one on Wikipedia. There's some comparison of the themes in this story to the ones in Lord of the Flies. I recall that the comparison piqued my interest and was what drew me to read this book back in 2021. I feel like the whole point of comparison is a stretch and that it's compounded by Lord of the Flies being published just a bit before Tunnel in the Sky, so folks were able to see it as a rebuttal or echo or whatever. But for my part, I'm unconvinced.

The next three books, starting with 1956's Time for the Stars are all brand new to me. And then we close the series out with two more re-reads. 

The Star Beast

I was in error with my statement at the end of the previous post, and I'll indulge myself a bit to try recapturing some of my own history with these books here.

Despite seeing his books on library shelves as a kid in the 90's, Heinlein wasn't one of the authors I picked up back then. At some point in this blog, I think I've talked about how I got into Asimov back in 1997. While I was still in high school, I began taking an interest in some other big-name science fiction authors, primarily Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance. I also got into L. Sprague de Camp through his work on Conan, but generally stuck to his fantasy stories and didn't think of him as a science fiction writer back then.

I think that my first actual Heinlein book was Stranger in a Strange Land, which I read in 2007. Over the next year or so while I was still going to GRCC, I also read Starship Troopers and Podkayne of Mars [addendum: I actually read Podkayne of Mars in 2006 and misremembered that detail here, although I'd later get it right. Oops]. Although I read some of Heinlein's "adult" fiction while I was working at the Covington Library, the only "juvenile" I read at that time was Starman Jones. I read Between Planets in 2012, followed by Space Cadet and The Star Beast in 2015. After something in a podcast piqued my interest, I checked out Tunnel in the Sky in 2021, which I'm seeing now was actually the very last book I ever checked out through KCLS (haven't been borrowing library books to read these past few years since I'm sitting on so many bookstore purchases).

When I said that The Star Beast was one of my favorites, I was actually saying that because I'd just started re-reading it and was a bit enthralled. But in 2015, I thought of it as just another juvenile. I saw that on Goodreads, I'd actually rated this one lower than most of the others. Apparently a decade ago, this book just didn't strike me as compelling. I will make a single excuse for 2015 Stephen Bahl: he was working for Clean Harbors at the time. His judgment was thrown off by that.

On my second reading, this is easily the best of the series so far. I love this book. It's a strange change of pace from previous entries. The Star Beast takes place entirely on Earth. It's a kind of creature feature, a magical pet story about John Thomas Stuart and his amazing companion, but with the twist that the surrounding events let it serve as a scathing satire of bureaucracy, sensationalist journalism, and politics. But even more poignantly, it tackles an even more important issue, which is just as real today as it was in 1954: our culture's tendency to heap responsibility onto adolescents while dismissing them as ignorant and inexperienced when they try to actually find their voice.

There's not a lot I have for this one other than gushing praise. My biggest criticism is that the character development for John Thomas's mother is a bit lacking and all at the end of the story, so her overbearing behavior is maybe a bit much even with the book's theme. But she's not a major presence in the story anyway. Betty is the notable human female character in this one, and she steals the show. And now for Critical Reception...

Damon Knight wrote: This is a novel that won't go bad on you. Many of science fiction's triumphs, even from as little as ten years ago, are unreadable today; they were shoddily put together, not meant for re-use. But Heinlein is durable. I've read this story twice, so far – once in the Fantasy and Science Fiction serialized version, once in hard covers – and expect to read it again, sooner or later, for pleasure. I don't know any higher praise.

Yeah. I'm slightly taken aback that I hadn't remembered this one as being so great. It's easily taken a place as not just my favorite of these juveniles, but as one of my favorite Heinlein novels and one of my favorite novels of all time.

Groff Conklin described the novel as "one of Heinlein's most enchanting tales." P. Schuyler Miller found The Star Beast to be "one of the best of 1954."

Agreed. I'm surprised that authors didn't do stories like this more often. It's squarely "science fiction" in the conventional sense and could be borderline "hard sci-fi" when it comes to human technology, but the Hroshii are basically fantasy monsters with powers and traits that defy human understanding.

Up next is Tunnel in the Sky from 1955, the third re-read in a row for me and also the Heinlein novel that I'd read most recently (2021) before embarking on this project. So it might be more fresh in my mind than The Star Beast or Starman Jones had been. From my recollection, I do not think I'll rate it quite as highly, but it's also not going to be dead last. Probably somewhere in the middle, but we'll see.

Starman Jones

As noted in previous entries, this is the first of run of three re-reads in a row for me. So I already knew that I was going to rate this one highly. I remembered loving it before. I briefly thought that I'd even place it above The Rolling Stones. I thought better of that, but this is still an excellent book. It has some of the nautical-adventure-but-in-space aspect that I attributed to Space Cadet, but without the naval academy component of that at all.

I think the elephant in the room here is that the main character, Max Jones, has a kind of super-eidetic memory: he can recall everything. Some of the main characters in previous stories were very talented or had technical skills and knowledge that would really stand out, but they were generally relatable characters as ordinary kids. But in this case, the main character basically gets a superpower. And it's central to the plot. Even after having read the book twice, I don't really know how to feel about it. Starman Jones is a great story and that story doesn't exist without this detail: it's too crucial. But it also makes the the previous six books seem more grounded in comparison, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that. Max is also one of my favorite characters among all of the Heinlein juveniles so far, and I don't know what that says about me either. Oh well.

Another fascinating aspect of this book is that there's a dystopian setting here. The blow is softened because Max makes it aboard a ship and almost all of the rest of the book takes place aboard that ship and on a remote uncharted planet. But we're shown enough of the Earth in this story to see that at least most of the planet is controlled by an oppressive guild system. Technically, the version of Earth in both Red Planet and in Between Planets seems pretty oppressive too, but that's in the context of controlling distant colonies and quelling rebellions. This is pretty different. Max had only ever been on Earth, but his prospects were vanishing to a pretty bleak point just because the system wouldn't give him a chance, and he had to cheat the system to get away from that. Reminds me of the Future History series as well as some of the stuff in Friday. Heinlein definitely liked exploring the theme of Earth going bad and of civilization needing to move to other worlds in order for humanity to survive, or at least for humanity to prosper. The future of the human race was among the stars, not languishing on Earth. Or something.

The superb use of dialogue I noticed in The Rolling Stones is present in this book as well. And ultimately, ranking this one is made or broken by the supporting cast: Sam Anderson, Eldreth Coburn, Doc Hendrix, Captain Blaine, etc. And now that I say that, I think I've got to conclude that while Sam and Doc Hendrix are successful in this regard, I've got mix feelings on the character of Eldreth. Her proficiency with 3-D chess seems a little too blatantly to have been concocted as a vehicle to teach Max a lesson that he's not necessarily smarter than girls, while her naivete feels a bit forced as a foil to emphasize Max's rugged upbringing and the street smarts it has bestowed on him. It feels nitpicky, but I say this with the previous book in the series being The Rolling Stones, which did a better job in comparison. Despite my nitpicking, Eldreth's character works well enough to make the story run smoothly and her dialogue is strong. However, the various members of the Worry Hole gang feel a bit too flat. They blend together too much, especially given how much time Max spends there.

The planet "Charity" and its symbiotic ecosystem is fascinating. I'd remembered the planet from my first reading, but I'd forgotten just how intriguing it was and how rushed and sparsely detailed the description of the settlement there actually was. There's just enough to make it seem like the story is moving to some interesting phase where Max and the ship's crew might have some interesting dynamic going on with the "colonists" in the new settlement, only for that to almost immediately get derailed.

It's between this book and Space Cadet for second place behind The Rolling Stones for now. And it's a close one. The supporting cast in Space Cadet is more balanced, but less ambitious. I'll give the nod to Starman Jones over Space Cadet, but only barely. So yeah, this one is really good. What's the "Critical Reception" say?

Groff Conklin in 1954 found the novel to be "a richly textured and thoroughly mature tale" and the best of the seven Heinlein juveniles available

Second best, I say. Also, kind of weird that most critics agree with me about the excellence of Between Planets and this one, but weren't as keen on The Rolling Stones.

Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas praised it for its "good character-development, rousing adventure-telling, and brilliant creation of several forms of extra-Terrestrial life".

Honestly, after a second reading, I want a kind of sequel in this same world just for the sake of exploring more of that "Charity" planet, even if it's not the same characters.

P. Schuyler Miller ranked it "close to the best in mainline science fiction".

It's a very strong one.

New York Times reviewer Villiers Gerson declared Starman Jones to be "superior science-fiction. ... carefully plotted, lucidly and beautifully written".

Agreed.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson described Starman Jones as "a classic example of the bildungsroman pattern" and noted that "with its bold symbolism, the book makes a universal appeal". Despite "coincidence and occasional melodrama" in the plotting, Williamson concluded that "the novel is a fine juvenile [which] reflects hopes and fears we all have known".

I think I grasp what he means by "coincidence." The plot is moved forward by a couple of remarkable coincidences. I don't know that I disagree about "melodrama" except that I'm actually not sure what he is classifying as melodrama here. It's too vague a term.

Damon Knight wrote that in Starman Jones "Heinlein is doing something more than just earning a living at the work he does supremely well: he's preparing a whole generation – the generation that will live to see the year 2000 – for the Age of Space that's as real to him now as it will be, must be, to them."

Wow. Looks like that review is from 1967. I've got to say that in 2025 it probably hits differently. Damon Knight is dead, but he actually did live to see the year 2000. I wonder what he thought at that time.

Up next is The Star Beast, which I distinctly remember being one of my favorites.

The Rolling Stones

I got somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the way through this one before pausing, re-reading Between Planets in its entirety, and returning to this one. That should be the first and only hiccup when it comes to reading these in publication order.

In hindsight, I'm a bit surprised that I had only ever heard of this book in the context that the Martian flat cats were the inspiration for Star Trek's "tribbles." I loved this one. And now I'm finally willing to dethrone Space Cadet as the best of the series. The Rolling Stones is actually that good. Better character development, excellent dialogue, and a plot that, while admittedly meandering, fits nicely with the nature of the story.

I don't know a term for the genre, but this one is a kind of family adventure story, where the whole family moves from each port to the next one. The eponymous Stone family are all seemingly geniuses in one respect or another, and their antics and problem-solving are presented in a manner that is fun, slightly comedic, and intriguing. Heinlein isn't afraid to gloss over the parts of their journey that would be boring. Strong themes of entrepreneurialism, family, and inventiveness run through the story. Although the twins, Castor and Pollux, are presented to the reader as the primary protagonists, their grandmother, Hazel, ends up stealing the show. She was clearly Heinlein's favorite character to write, probably out of any character up to this point in his entire career.

Having read it now, I can hardly believe that this book isn't more popular. I imagine that, to some extent, there isn't really any strong good vs. evil theme going on here. It's just a fun story about a family in space. Sometimes their own lives are on the line, but that's it. It's not overtly political and there's no villainous character. I can see how someone who really wanted that stuff might find The Rolling Stones to be lacking. But the writing is some of Heinlein's best, and this book deserves recognition for that.

These days, I think that there's more pressure on authors to write explicitly in series of books and to connect stories in shared universes. I knew that Heinlein reused some details repeatedly, but I'm left wondering to what extent he envisioned these "Juveniles" as sharing a universe. The descriptions of Martian life seem to be consistent with Red Planet and the brief comments on Ganymede are consistent with Farmer in the Sky. The idea that the asteroid belt comprises the remnants of a destroyed planet, as demonstrated in Space Cadet and used repeatedly in many of Heinlein's other stories, also shows up here. I think that Heinlein mostly just reused whichever concepts he felt like reusing, but with no commitment that any one one book would be canonically set in the same universe as another, at least until he started deliberately connecting his "Future History" stories to each other. Notably, The Rolling Stones has a minor connection to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

And now for some Critical Reception.

Jo Walton writes that as a teenager, she considered the book one of the weakest of the Heinlein juveniles; upon rereading it as an adult, it "leaves me feeling I can't get no satisfaction."

Well, obviously I disagree. Also, I don't care for the rock and roll reference gag in that review. It's just a little too obvious. This book predates "The Rolling Stones" as a rock bad by a decade, and there's really nothing that interesting about the shared name.

Both Walton and James Nicoll criticize the book's sexual politics, with Nicoll specifically stating that "(t)he [book's] sexual politics are tragic."

I actually had no idea what these idiots were talking about? Sexual politics? This is a family-friendly story, you weird perverts. Looking up the review from the "tragic" line, it seems that the reviewer's gripe is with the perceived mistreatment of Meade, the older sister of the two primary main characters, Castor and Pollux. Essentially, the twins get top billing, followed closely by their mischievous grandmother (Hazel) and their exasperated father (Roger). Their mother (Edith) gets fewer lines of dialogue for sure, but her expertise as a medical doctor keeps coming up and serves as a reason that other characters in the story are contacting the family in the first place. Although the twins' older sister Meade and younger brother Lowell are generally there with the rest of the family for most events, they're somewhat relegated to serving as minor characters. Apparently this dork named James Nicoll is offended that Meade doesn't get a bigger role. He's also affronted at some trivial details. For instance, after a brief introduction to the twins themselves, the first chapter has them arrive late for dinner to the family residence (this is before the family moves into a spaceship). When they arrive, their mother is "modeling a head of their older sister." For the rest of that scene, Edith occasionally instructs Meade not to move, something which really bothers James Nicoll for some reason. I can't remember the modeling thing ever coming up again in the book. Also, that's not what "tragic" means. You can't just use that word as a stand-in for "something I didn't like." What a loser.

Heinlein himself wrote, in a letter to his agent after he had finished the first quarter of the book, that it had "an unsatisfactory story line thereafter," and that he found a "domestic comedy" "harder to write" than "revolutions and blood."

Don't get me wrong. I'm fine with revolutions in blood too. But I think that he did a fine job with this one. It doesn't have the more grand plot of something like Red Planet or Between Planets, but character development, witty dialogue, and interesting settings are enough to compensate for that.

Groff Conklin described the novel as "a thoroughly delightful job". Boucher and McComas praised it as "easily the most plausible, carefully detailed picture of an interplanetary future we will encounter in any year". P. Schuyler Miller cited the novel's "freshness and simplicity," characterizing it as "a life-size portrait-gallery of real people living in a real world of the future, every detail of which fits into place with top-tolerance precision".

Now, that's more like it.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Heinlein's story as "a dream of personal freedom" written with "an enviable craftsmanship", noted that the novel "carries its thematic burden tightly", unlike Heinlein's later adult novels, and praised The Rolling Stones for its "sense of an accurately extrapolated future background, with all of the new technologies given an air of commonplace reality".

In general, I do think that Heinlein nearly always did a great job of writing stories in a futuristic setting and making them seem futuristic without falling into the pit traps of either being so vague as to be surreal or so technical as to turn the story in a gadget story. That definitely applies here. Without any specific books being named, I don't know whether I agree or disagree with the comparison to "Heinlein's later adult novels." There are a lot of them, after all.

Well, I just started re-reading 1953's Starman Jones. After that it's 1954's The Star Beast followed by 1955's Tunnel in the Sky, both of which are also re-reads. So the next three entries here will all be for books I've already read once.

Between Planets

 I was already about two-thirds of my way through the 1952 novel, The Rolling Stones, by the time my copy of Between Planets arrived. So another one of these posts should arrive sooner rather than later. And like I said, I already read Between Planets years ago and it was one of my favorites. Well, now that my re-reading is fresh, how does it hold up?

I rate this as the second-best of the novels so far. In some ways, it should really even take the #1 spot. The strong points here are strong. The Venerian "dragons" and the delicate, enigmatic Martians presented in this story are interesting aliens. Heinlein's portrayal of the struggles of an adolescent finding himself unwittingly at the center of political intrigue is convincing and poignant. Don is smart enough to know that things are tense, observant enough to know that some of the other characters are lying to him, and experienced enough to know that some characters are overconfident or foolish in their own assessments, but he is still frustrated and ultimately clueless for much of the story.

I'd remembered the two key plot points involving the Isobel character, but was pleasantly surprised to see how much actual presence she got in the text, easily more than any female character so far (although I already know that The Rolling Stones will shatter that record). But the real star of the show here is the recurring dragon character, "Sir Isaac Newton."

Ultimately, where I consider this story to fall short of the standard set by Space Cadet is in the abrupt Deus Ex Machina with no real denouement and too little detail to feel engaging. Both Space Cadet and Red Planet finish very strongly, while Farmer in the Sky and Between Planets sort of feel rushed, as though Heinlein couldn't think of a satisfying conclusion and just phoned it in. No idea if there's any chance that that is what happened, though. Apart from that flaw, this really does stand out as the best written and most interesting of Heinlein's juveniles so far.

If Book #2 was a naval academy coming-of-age story set in space, Book #3 was a Western set in space, and Book #4 was a pioneer story set in space, I guess I'd kind of liken Between Planets to something like Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain, a revolutionary war story (in space). I don't know if I can keep doing this analogy for every one of these books, and I already don't know how to classify the very first one anyway. But there you have it. Now for some Critical Reception.

Groff Conklin reviewed the novel favorably, calling it "a magnificently real and vivid Picture of the Possible".

 It's an excellent one for sure.

Boucher and McComas named it among the best sf novels of 1951, characterizing it as "more mature than most 'adult' science fiction".

I'm actually not sure what "mature" means in  this context.

P. Schuyler Miller praised the novel as "very smoothly and logically put together", although he noted that it lacked the level of "elaboration of background detail" that he expected from Heinlein.

 Yes! Exactly. Well, that's mostly a problem for the final section of the book. The early and middle parts are richly detailed.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Between Planets as "mov[ing] the series still farther from its juvenile origins toward grownup concerns". Although describing the plot as "pretty traditional space opera", he praised the novel for its "ably drawn" characters, its "well-imagined" background, and its "story told with zest". Williamson also noted that Heinlein closed the novel "with a vigorous statement of his unhappiness with 'the historical imperative' leading to the loss of individual freedom as governmental organizations grew".

I know that Heinlein is constantly accused of laying it on thick with the political stuff in Starship Troopers, and I'll have some words to say once we come to that one. But the portrayal of politics in Between Planets is good stuff, and shouldn't be remotely objectionable to anyone with more than half a brain.

I'm already nearly done with The Rolling Stones, so we'll have another post coming soon. After that, it's on to a cluster of re-reads: three in a row.

Farmer in the Sky

Well, I think that this is easily the weakest story so far. Now, it's not bad. As a pioneer story in space, it's generally well-conceived and engaging. I'll also give it props for using more grim and mature themes than the earlier stories, and for doing a fine job of that as well.

I hadn't realized it, but this story was serialized in Boys' Life magazine. Not sure if it was hand to Scribner's after that, but I assume so. The book is full of references to scouting, most of which have little connection to the main plot. So it becomes a bit distracting. There's a larger cast of characters than in the earlier novels, and while I enjoyed many of the characters, at some point the roster outgrew the capacity of the story to maintain proper focus and flow. Farmer in the Sky is still well worth the read, but I couldn't get into it as much as I did with Space Cadet and Red Planet.

I wish that Heinlein had given us more time for the Hank Jones character to act as a proper foil to Bill. Also, I can't get over this image I found on Wikipedia.

A major event in the book involves a moonquake on Ganymede triggered by the alignment of Jupiter's inner moons. Heinlein apparently wasn't aware that the alignment he described was impossible. Seems like something that would have been known to astronomy as a whole even back in 1950. I'd think it would be amusing to see what response, if any, Heinlein had in his own lifetime to this fact being pointed out. Anyway, let's get to some "Critical Reception."

Groff Conklin wrote that although Farmer in the Sky was "conceived as a novel for 'adolescents' ... this book is also one of the best of the month's output in science fiction for adults ... an adventure story with an unusual amount of realism in its telling. It is not childish".

I deduce that much of this is owed to the descriptions of devastation in the aftermath of the aforementioned moonquake, including the death of a family member and the main characters' realistic response to it.

Boucher and McComas named Farmer "just about the only mature science fiction novel of the year [1950]", describing it as "a magnificently detailed study of the technological and human problems of interplanetary colonization."

I concur with that characterization.

Damon Knight found the novel "a typical Heinlein story ... typically brilliant, thorough and readable."

Sure. Like I said, this one is not bad. I'd even say it's good. But Space Cadet and Red Planet are great, and this one has to follow them. Nevertheless, it is brilliant.

P. Schuyler Miller recommended the novel unreservedly, saying that Heinlein's "minute attention to detail ... has never been more fascinatingly shown."

I mean, I'm not going to dispute these comments. I'd have thought that there'd be better reception for the two previous books. That's all.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson noted that Farmer in the Sky "has harsh realism for a juvenile." He described it as "a novel of education" where the protagonist "tell[s] his own story in a relaxed conversational style."

Again, I apparently agree with the critics. "Relaxed conversational style" is a good way to describe Bill's narration.

This concludes the four books I purchased bundled together in the Four Frontiers omnibus. The next book in sequence should be the 1951 novel, Between Planets. Well, I ran into a problem. My fault. I thought that I'd bought all of the books. To my surprise, when I went to open Between Planets, I found that I was actually opening a nonfiction astronomy book from 1956 (technically, a revised edition of a book originally published in 1941) by Fletcher G. Watson: Between the Planets. Articles are critical. A copy of the correct book is on its way and I should receive it next week. In the meantime, I've already started the 1952 book: The Rolling Stones. Ordinarily, I'd be bummed out to be reading the books out-of-sequence. But I have already read Between Planets and it's actually one of my favorites. I figure if I'm going to have this sort of mishap, at least at least it's with a book I'd already read anyway. I'm sure I'll have high praise for Between Planets, either before or after I post an entry here for The Rolling Stones.

Red Planet

I went into this one essentially blind. I knew that it was published in 1949 and I assumed from the title that it would take place on Mars.

Given the general use of rite of passage themes in the first two novels, I started to get an impression from this one early on, and it turned out to be way off. I assumed that we were being introduced to Jim and Frank as characters in their home life before they were sent off to a boarding school and that the school itself would be the primary setting for the story. When conflict emerged between Jim and the strict new headmaster at the school, I thought that this was going to be a novel with that conflict as its central theme. I thought that everything was building to that. Instead, Heinlein immediately raised the stakes and had the main characters trekking through the wilderness while evading corrupt government agents in a desperate bid to make it home and warn their families of impending treachery. It's a kind of frontier story. I don't have a lot of familiarity with Westerns, but I got the impression that this could be a Western. Just change some details around and move it to Mars.

I had no idea that the iconic Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land had predecessors in one of the old Heinlein juveniles. That was kind of cool to see. Not as cool as the Venerians in Space Cadet, and it might not have resonated with me if I hadn't already read that later novel (neither book is a sequel to the other, but Heinlein borrowed some of the features of his Martians from Red Planet for his Stranger in a Strange Land Martians).

I'm really curious how cold Heinlein thought it was on Mars back in 1949, or what scientists knew about the planet back then. I take it for granted, especially with these early works, that we have far more knowledge about the true conditions on the surfaces of these planets than was available back when Heinlein wrote these stories. It's easy to forget that when the book immediately establishes that the surface is extremely cold and that the atmosphere is not breathable. But the version of Mars in Red Planet is reminiscent of Antarctic conditions on Earth, perhaps with a bit of Mount Everest thrown in. Actual conditions on Mars are far more harsh.

I like this one. Not enough to dethrone Space Cadet, but it's actually kind of close. And now let's check out "Critical Reception."

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Red Planet as Heinlein's first genuinely successful effort in the sequence, saying that "Heinlein [has] found his true direction ... The Martian setting is logically constructed and rich in convincing detail [while] the characters are engaging and the action develops naturally."

Not sure how the first two efforts in the sequence were unsuccessful. But yeah, this one is good. I'll grudgingly admit that, in some ways, it's actually the best one so far.

P. Schuyler Miller, reviewing the original edition, praised the novel's "verisimilitude, the attention to detail which Heinlein's adult readers know well. . . . the explanations are never dragged in for their own sake, and the plot grows naturally out of the setting."

Good take. Guess I don't have much to add.

I've already well into Farmer in the Sky. That'll be the final story in the "Four Frontiers" bound volume I've been lugging around. Then it's on to Between Planets, a book that I read years ago and expect to regard highly on my second reading.

Space Cadet

This was the first Heinlein juvenile that ended up being a re-read for me, and I recalled it being one of my favorites of the bunch. I didn't remember that it was the second of these books to be written and published, dating all the way back to 1948.

This one might prove a high bar to clear for the rest of the series. It's a great book. The general concept of a naval academy coming-of-age story set in space is simple and predictable enough, but the character development is superb. I love the Venerians in this book. They're some of the coolest science fiction aliens I can think of. Heinlein did go back to Venus, but as far as I know he never revisited these particular aliens again and no other authors did anything like them. Too bad.

Maybe it's my lack of familiarity with science fiction from this era at work here, but one of the striking themes of Space Cadet is the importance of having the strategic military infrastructure in space controlled by the good guys, a theme that is deplorably understated these days, and it's bizarre to me that the first story to explore this theme is a book written for young boys. Heinlein was laying it out for kids in 1948, but now adults can't come to terms with this reality. Yikes. You guys, have we fallen or something? I don't know. Wasn't planning to make this a deep series of blog posts. Let's move on.

And let's engage with some "Critical Reception."

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Space Cadet as "a long step forward. ... The characters are stronger [and] the background is carefully built, original, and convincing, the story suspenseful enough." Williamson noted that Heinlein was "perfecting the bildungsroman form that shapes the whole series."

That's a fair characterization. Not much to add to that.

P. Schuyler Miller gave the book a favorable review as "a first-rate historical novel of the near future," saying "So subtly has the scientific detail been interwoven with plot and action that the reader never realizes how painstakingly it has been worked out."

Well, "near future" might be a bit of a stretch. Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure as to when Space Cadet is supposed to be set. I believe that 1971 is given as the year for the pioneering voyage to Venus, which comes up as something in the distant past for that characters in the book, but exactly how distant is not officially stated.

Like I said, this is going to be a high bar to clear. Up next we've got a book I know nothing about: Red Planet. Since I was bored half to death by Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, I hope that I have a better reaction to this one.

Rocket Ship Galileo

My earlier post about Heinlein juveniles indicated that you might not see anything more until "well into December." That ended up being far too optimistic. Oops. But we got there eventually.

This was the first Heinlein juvenile and one of a few that I knew absolutely nothing about prior to starting my little project. So I went into this one blind. I ended up being pleasantly surprised. Rocket Ship Galileo is an underrated book. It's light on interpersonal drama and character development and forgoes worldbuilding on the basis that it takes place in America and that readers already know what America is like. It's the future. There are rocket ships. They can go to space. Deal with it.

I know that there have been other points in my life when the somewhat shallow character development in this one would cause me to rate it unfavorably compared to Heinlein's later work. So I guess it's fortunate that I held off on this one until I was 39. I found the trim, technical nature of this one to be satisfying. I think it meets the definition of "hard" science fiction, although the book is actually so old that it predates the term (just looked it up and supposedly "hard science fiction" was coined a decade later).

I don't know if I'll do this for all of these books, but I found a "critical reception" section on the Wikipedia article for this one, and I think I'll respond to it.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson noted that while Rocket Ship Galileo remains "readable, with Heinlein's familiar themes already emerging," it was a "sometimes fumbling experiment. ... The plot is often trite, and the characters are generally thin stereotypes."

I actually don't know what this means. Very little time was devoted to character development, and none of the characters were stereotypical in any way I can think of. There's a very minor recurring theme with the Cargraves character being uncomfortable with the aggressive driving habits of the teenage characters, but that feels like such a trivial detail to use as the basis for a review.

Robert Wilfred Franson said that "Heinlein wants there always to be young people of the right mind and character to seize such opportunities. His novels went a long way toward educating such a class of people, and still are doing so."

Yeah, that's part of why I chose to embark on this little journey.

Andrew Baker wrote: "'Rocket Ship Galileo' shares with numerous works composed before the advent of the actual Space Program a gross underestimation of the huge costs and investment of resources needed for any jaunt outside Earth's gravitational field. (...) The idea of private people (boys in this case) being able to just take off to the Moon on their own can ultimately be traced - like so many Science Fiction themes - to the fertile mind of H. G. Wells and to the two English gentlemen quietly taking off to the Moon in The First Men in the Moon. (...) The politics of 'Galileo' are still those of the World War II anti-Nazi Alliance, not of the emerging Cold War. Had it been written a few years later, the villains would have likely been Russian Communists."

I suspect that Heinlein had a better grasp on the technical challenges of space flight than Andrew Baker, who seems to have misread the book. It's not a few boys building a rocket and taking off to the moon. It's a professional rocket scientist who creates a design for a nuclear-powered rocket drive, but whose last commercial venture went poorly, so he lacks the funds to realize his dream. When old, basically-still-spaceworthy rockets are sold as government surplus to make room for a newer generation of rockets, he buys one and recruits his nephew's amateur rocket club to help him retrofit the existing orbital space rocket into a rocket capable of voyaging to and landing on the moon. Not only does this book take place in a world where space travel already exists, but Heinlein even invents details about differences between the space suits that the characters wear while on the moon and the earlier models of space suits. This criticism makes it seem like Earth's gravity well is just too much for private enterprise, while disregarding the fact that we're talking about a nuclear-powered rocket. Nuclear power is a gamechanger.

As for the Nazi villains, I felt like they were super-cheesy when I was actually reading the book, but after the fact I had to admit that this was because they struck me as being too similar to all of the later stories to reuse Nazis as villains. In Heinlein's defense, he beat just about everyone to the punch with this one. Lots of authors have done "the Nazis are back" as the villains in their stories. It looks like Heinlein invented that trope. And I think there's a rule somewhere that the first book to use a trope gets a pass or something.

The line about the Russians is hilarious, written as though Andrew Baker has no knowledge of anything else Heinlein ever wrote. Heinlein's career spanned almost all of the Cold War. He had plenty of time to make the Russians the bad guys in his books if he wanted to.

This one was good, but I'm already rereading Space Cadet, which was one of my favorites among the Heinlein juveniles I read before this project. We'll see how I think it holds up...